An anonymous reader writes: Eric De La Cruz, (@EricDLCruz on Twitter) age 27, who resides in Nevada, is in dire need of a heart transplant. He is dying. His sister, Veronica (@VeronicaDLCruz on Twitter), is doing all she can to help her brother. However, she is caught in the red-tape system in Nevada. He needs Medicare Disability.

Eric has been turned down for the heart transplant list because he is on Nevada Medicaid, and there are no transplant centers in Nevada. He needs to get to California under the Medicare Disability program. He has been rejected twice and the next appeals hearing is in one year. Eric has Severe Dilated Cardiomyopathy with an EF of 15%. His kidneys are having trouble because of his heart. His creatinine levels are high, his blood pressure is very low and he keeps retaining fluid.

$150,000 is needed to get Eric on a transplant list, and the transplant is projected to cost nearly $800,000.

dlayphoto writes: "Part 2 of Steal This Film, a multi-part documentary about P2P and The Pirate Bay, has been released to Bit Torrent. It is available as a PAL DVD Image, XVID, iPod, and 720p HD Formats.
Copying and distribution by any means is highly encouraged!"

Posted
by
Zonk
on Sunday December 30, 2007 @12:31AM
from the because-we-needed-another-reason-to-be-cranky-at-them dept.

mrneutron2003 writes "With this past week's announcement by Warner to release its entire catalog to Amazon in MP3 format with no Digital Rights Management, you would think that the organization that represents them, The RIAA, would begin changing its tune. Instead, they are pressing on in their campaign against consumers by suing individuals who merely rip CDs they've purchased legally. 'The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.'"

dlayphoto writes: "After being approved by Lakewood's City Hall, AT&T quickly went to work building their U-Verse network, code named Project Lightspeed. What AT&T didn't say, though, was that they would be installing over 50 of them throughout the city, which is noted for being the most densely-populated city between New York and Chicago.

After AT&T recently received a statewide approval to provide video service to the entire state, this can only get worse.

An anonymous reader writes: Time Warner Cable has received the second state-wide franchise agreement, covering 260 communities, in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement.
Normally operators negotiate franchise agreements at the local level.

Hugh Pickens writes: "There is a long article in the NYTimes well worth reading called "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft" about the business strategies both companies are pursuing and about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based cloud and about 2,000 companies are signing up every day for Google Apps, simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft's lucrative Office business. Microsoft faces a business quandary as they to try to link the Web to its desktop business — "software plus Internet services," in its formulation. Microsoft will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups but it is "unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating." David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, "a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.""

dlayphoto writes: "For years, no military program has sparked more fevered speculation from conspiracy theorists than the mysterious High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. And for years, the Pentagon has been pooh-poohing speculation that the enormous collection of transmitters, radars, and magnetometers in Alaska was some sort of superweapon.
But, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may not have been entirely off-base, after all.
Since its inception, there's been a huge range of opinion on what HAARP actually does: everything from a giant mind control facility to a space nuke countermeasure to a weather controller to an ionosphere-boiling mad science experiment to the mother of all pork projects has been suggested. But now that the program is actually up an running, military managers say the electronics array has much more benign use. "HAARP's main job is to produce radio waves to probe the ionosphere," an Air Force Research Laboratory officer said in October."

dlayphoto writes: "As people become more rude about using their cellphones in inappropriate places, people are trying to foil them...with a price.

"The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets — and it also pursues their users.

Investigators from the F.C.C. and Verizon Wireless visited an upscale restaurant in Maryland over the last year, the restaurant owner said. The owner, who declined to be named, said he bought a powerful jammer for $1,000 because he was tired of his employees focusing on their phones rather than customers.

"Dear Subscriber,We regret to inform you that the company we contract with to provide online services, Convio, has identified a breach of one of their internet security systems. There was no breach of personally-identifiable information or credit card data, but your email address and password for managing your Act For Change and Working For Change subscriptions were obtained by an unauthorized third party.

There is potential for misuse of this information should you use the same email address and password on other personal accounts (e.g, banking, PayPal, Amazon, etc.) Convio would like to advise you of important steps that you can and should take to prevent misuse of your personal information:If this email address and password are used together on any other accounts, it is recommended that you change your password on those accounts and sites immediately. We recognize that this is an enormous inconvenience, but this step will minimize your security risk.

Pay careful attention to emails you may receive requesting personal and financial information, and only provide it when you can confidently confirm that it has come from a trusted organization.

Report any suspicious activity immediately to the account provider (bank, credit card, etc.) and to credit bureaus. We take your privacy seriously, and as a protective step have immediately deleted all passwords from the Act For Change and Working For Change website and subscriptions. This will not affect your subscriptions or site usage, and you will simply be prompted to create a new password when you go to manage your account.

Our vendor Convio has asked us to convey their deepest apology and assurance that security has been restored. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call (800) 788-0898* or email customerservice@wafs.com."